System and method for verifying the identity of a sender of electronic mail and preventing unsolicited bulk email

Abstract

The present invention provides a method and system for preventing unsolicited bulk email (UBE). Spammers sending UBE typically capitalize on the weakness of SMTP. The present invention affixes a subscriber key value to the local part of an email address. The email and associated key value are sent to a server where the subscriber key value, and subscriber and recipient email addresses are associated and stored into a database. Once stored, the email is sent to the ultimate recipient. A recipient is in possession of a subscriber key value can use this key value to sign an email they intend to send to the original subscriber / sender. Recipient will then send this signed email to a server where the association between the subscriber and the subscriber key value is verified. Once verified the email is sent to the subscriber. In some embodiments, the verification process is not controlled by a server.

Description

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATION [0001] This application claims benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application 60 / 692,784 filed Jun. 21, 2005, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety. This application is also related to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11 / ______ (Attorney Docket Number 5034.001us2) entitled “System and Method for Encoding and Verifying the Identity of a Sender of Electronic Mail and Preventing Unsolicited Bulk Email,” filed on even date herewith, which is incorporated by reference in its entirety.FIELD OF THE INVENTIONS [0002] This invention relates to the field of a computer-implemented system and method for verifying the identity of a sender of electronic mail for the purpose of preventing unsolicited bulk email. COPYRIGHT NOTICE [0003] This patent document contains copyrightable computer software elements including but not limited to source code, flow charts and screen displays. The following notice shall apply to these elements: Copyright...

AI Technical Summary

Problems solved by technology

Unfortunately, however, email is now frequently used as the medium for widespread marketing broadcasts of messages to a large number of email addresses.

Large service providers and corporations are particularly susceptible to this practice, which is commonly known as spamming, or the sending of unsolicited bulk email (UBE), commonly called spam.

The economic cost associated with the sending of UBE is massive.

By some estimates UBE costs corporations over $10 billion dollars a year to control.

This approach, however, is vulnerable to rapid changes to the source of the UBE (e.g., changes to the “From” field in the email header), which is relatively easy because most spam is generated by automated means.

Such approaches also typically require the set up and maintenance of a complex filtering mechanism.

Senders of UBE (Spammers) typically exploit the fact that the SMTP does not always validate or verify the identity of the sender of email (the loophole).

Specifically, while the receiver of email is verified by one of many applications residing at the application layer of the TCP / IP protocol stack, the identity of the actual sender is rarely verified.

Accordingly, the inability of SMTP to reliably and consistently verify the identity of the sender of email is a loophole that is exploited on a massive scale by those sending UBLE.

Another solution would require the sender's computer to solve some computational puzzle such as factoring a large number using a large amount of computer processing time which would add up to a prohibitive amount of process time for large bulk email operations.

One problem with a DomainKey solution to the problem of UBE is that it is not cost effective, for it requires modifying DNS servers by implementing new encryption software on all the world's DNS servers.

Such a solution also has an unintended side effect of slowing internet traffic, for all the world's email must be verified via this encryption algorithm.

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